Ep 56. Easily Delighted

I am Kym Showers, and this is Reinvented After 40, episode number 56: Easily Delighted.

Hey, friends. Welcome to Reinvented After 40, a podcast for all you women in the second half of life who are ready to take responsibility for your own wellbeing and create a life you love living.

I’m your host, Kym Showers, and after spending the first 40 years of my life people-pleasing and following all the rules, I was exhausted and ready for a change. I reinvented myself. I stopped outsourcing my happiness. And I’ve been brave enough to live a different kind of life.

I’ll be here each week to help you do the same thing. It’s gonna be fun. Let’s go.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. So today I want to talk to you about how fun it is to be the kind of woman who is easily delighted. I am intentional about this and I kind of just noticed this about myself. So, here’s a couple of things I’m going to remind you of. We have three months left in 2022. And three months equals around 90 days. And 90 days is kind of very specific and it is a good measurement of what we can accomplish, a goal that we can set for ourselves. It’s plenty of time, a realistic amount of time to set a goal and then to achieve the goal.

So, what our brain likes to do is jump offline around this time of the year and just decide for us that the year is kind of done, it’s kind of over. So, if we haven’t accomplished what we decided in January that we want to accomplish, well, now it’s already October, the first week of October when you’re listening to this and your brain will tell you, well, it’s kind of too late. There’s not enough time to get done what we really want to get done. And I’m here to promise you, your brain is wrong.

So, 90 days is what I like to tell my clients, that’s all we need is 90 days to set our goal. It’s the perfect little container where we can break it down 30 days, 60 days and then 90 days. And so, if we start now it’s perfect to achieve or to learn anything new that we want to achieve or learn. You might want to take piano lessons, maybe you want to learn how to play the piano, or play the guitar, or play any kind of instrument, a violin.

And I promise you, 90 days, if you’re committed and you practice every day, and you hire a teacher today and then you just go all in and practice for an hour every day. By the time January 1st, 2023, is here you will be playing the piano. You will be playing the guitar. You will be playing the violin. What if you decided like I did, January 1st, that you want to become a swimmer, and so you just decided okay, I’m going to find out, I’m going to find me a pool today. Wherever you are living I promise you, there is a lap pool available to you.

So, I want you to, if you want to become a swimmer, like I did, and you want to have a swimmer’s body, and you want to have a strong healthy heart. And you want to get stronger by the week, you want to build up your lung capacity, you want to have stronger legs, stronger arms, a stronger belly, a stronger core. You want to have strong shoulders, you want to become a swimmer, you can start right now and by the time January 1st gets here of 2023, you will be a legitimate swimmer.

You will look like a swimmer, you will act like a swimmer, you will think like a swimmer. I promise you, 90 days is the perfect amount of time if you decide today, and you start today. That’s all you have to do. That’s all I ever did. And now three-quarters of the way through 2022, I am a swimmer who swims three miles a week in a pool. I am 61 years old, and I started January 1st of 2022. And by the first 90 days, by the end of March 2022, I was a legit swimmer just because I decided and all we need is 90 days. That is delightful. That’s a delightful way to live.

And delight is a feeling that comes from our thinking. And everything that we decide to do, we can create for ourselves. So, you can be easily offended if you decide to be, or you can be easily delighted if you decide to be. You can be easily frustrated if you decide to be, or you can be easily delighted if you decide to be. It’s a choice, we just keep making these amazing choices. We either make them on default or we make them intentionally. So, I just decided a long time ago, I am a very happy girl. And I’m going to continue being a very happy girl the rest of my life.

And I am completely easily delighted every single day because that’s the mindset that I have decided to work on. And you can do the exact same thing. So that’s why it plays out when you’re an easily delighted woman then it shows up in the way that you spend your time. It shows up in the things that you’re committed to, the activities you’re committed to.

And I promise you, when you set a 90 day goal between now and the end of 2022, the beginning of 2023, you accomplish something that you just decide on today, maybe something you’ve always wanted to do but you’ve let brain talk you out of it. Your brain thinks it’s too hard. Your brain thinks you’re not strong enough. Your brain thinks that you’re weak. Your brain thinks you don’t have enough time. Your brain thinks you’re too old. Your brain doesn’t think you’re smart enough. None of those things are true, they’re all not true.

So, I read a cute, someone I follow on Instagram, this morning, a cute girl from Bakersfield, she said, I think her and her family, kind of can’t remember the details. So, she said that she went hiking this weekend for the first time. And it looked like they went somewhere pretty good, like, I don’t know, somewhere like Yosemite or somewhere like that. But she said, “I’m so proud of myself for doing something that seemed so hard in my head but ended up being so much fun instead.” Don’t you love that?

I’m going to read it to you again. “I’m so proud of myself for doing something that seemed so hard in my head but ended up being so much fun instead.” And I loved that because everything that we want seems so hard in our head. That is true, but it’s always so fun, instead we just have to overcome what our brain is offering us, that’s it. So, to become easily delighted, which this cute girl was so delighted by, kind of by herself.

She was so proud of herself and that feeling of pride, when you’ve overcome your brain and you’ve done something that your brain has always made you think was too hard and you tried it anyways and you went all in, and you found, oh my gosh, this is so much fun. That’s a woman who’s easily delighted. That’s why I find so much delight in my days because I’m always overcoming my brain. That is always my intention at 61.

I was reading an article this morning about people who have retired and I’m just kind of fascinated by this idea of retirement because I think it’s something that has just been fed to us by our society, you work till you’re 60, you save up a certain amount of money that you can live modestly on for the rest of your life and then you just – I don’t know what you do. But I do not want to retire. I mean Jeff and I say we live kind of semi-retirement, but I don’t even like that word. I just want to be easily delighted for the rest of my life.

And I don’t think that retirement for me evokes that same feeling that easily delighted evokes for me because easily delighted for me means that I’m working, I’m working on something. I have a goal. I want to be better, not better in a valuable sense or my worthiness sense because I can’t be worthier than I’ve ever been, and neither can you. But better, like stronger in certain areas or learning something new. I always like to just be challenged by a new feeling, or a new practice, or getting better at something.

So just like I have been with swimming, and I have gotten so much better at coaching. And I have been so brave in my business and getting better with money, and creating money. and just my thoughts around money. And better at having a business mind and running a business. So, all of these things that I do, and all of the ways that I challenge myself, and all the ways that I challenge my clients, and then the way that they show up and become literally higher versions of themselves before my eyes, week, after week, after week. That easily delights me.

There is so much delight in that, and that feeling of delight just promotes more of the same, more delight, more challenges. more goals. This is a very fun way to live in the second half of life. Retirement sounds worrying to me. Retirement sounds a little bit stifling to me, this is what you have to work with the rest of your life. So, from 60 on, this is the amount of money you have to work with, this is the house you’re going to live in, this is what you can afford and what you can’t afford.

That’s a hard no for me. I’m like, “No, no one’s ever going to tell me this is how it’s going to be for me.” I know that there is so much more and I’m willing to figure what it is and to create it for myself. I mean it’s the best way, it’s the only way for me. So, I’m just going to keep leading this way of pure delight, of being the kind of woman in the second half of life whose primary emotion is delight. I mean isn’t that what we all want?

Because think about when we’re delighted, the kind of actions that we take on our life, with the way that we show up to all of our relationships, the way our face looks every day, just so happy, and full of energy, and excitement, and motivation. That’s a woman who’s easily delighted, that’s a woman who thinks for herself and decides what she wants to do and then she goes and makes it happen. She gets up every single day and she keeps doing the thing, the hard thing that she’s become so proud herself for. That’s easily delighted right there.

The thing that your brain has convinced you is too hard, but the minute that you start doing it, you realize it’s so much fun, that’s a woman who creates delight in her life and becomes a delightful human being on the planet and puts out so much delight in the world around her. It’s completely up to us. It is never our circumstances. So, we have, you guys, my friends, we have 30 days ahead of us to create any single thing we want. You could learn how to parasail, you could learn how to surf, or paddleboard, or you could become a runner.

Oh my gosh, I became a runner, I mean I am a runner, I will always be a runner. I can go out and run three miles no problem, any time of any day, because I became a runner so long ago and I just kept running. And that is so much fun, but you can become a runner, you could become a cyclist. Get yourself a bike, get yourself a helmet, get yourself the gear and get going, get on the road, get on the bike path. Start riding your bike, just start small and then create something that you’re so proud of, if it’s something you’ve always wanted to do.

It can be anything, put your imagination to work. So, my coach, her name is April Price and she’s been my coach now for a few years and I love her so much. She’s been super inspiring. She’s an amazing coach for my brain and she knows me very well. So, she doesn’t let me get away with anything, so I keep rehiring her. All my clients who keep rehiring me, I’m doing the exact same things, just so you know, but it’s been so useful for me. So, she keeps trying new things too.

And this last weekend, I think for the last year now I want to say, she has been training for this event, this mountain climbing event. She does not like aerobic activity. So, this was a huge challenge for her. So, it was called 29029 and she flew to Whistler, British Columbia, and anyone that’s been to Whistler knows how beautiful Whistler Mountain is. Jeff and I have been to Whistler, and it is spectacular, and that mountain is so gigantic. She climbed 29,029 feet this last weekend. And I think she had 36 hours to do it.

It’s the equivalent of climbing Mount Everest without actually climbing Mount Everest. So, I think she had to ascend, I’m taking a guess here, but I think she told me, she had to ascend Whistler mountain, climb Whistler Mountain either six times or eight times. And then she rode the gondola back down in 36 hours. That was the equivalent of climbing Mount Everest without kind of the dangers of climbing Mount Everest. So, she did this as a challenge, she did it with her son and she did it with her brother. So, it was kind of a family affair.

But she had been training I know for sure since January. So at least nine months now she’s been training on the treadmill. And it has been grueling. I’ve been kind of just keeping track a little bit of her training and just her mindset. And she just put out on her podcast, she just put out lessons learned from training for this major event. But this put her in a training mindset all year. She was committed to this event and there was no possible way she could do this event without training the way she did. And she hired a coach to train her.

And she was ready for it, but of course she was super nervous and super excited at the same time, which you know I love those two feelings together because that means we’re doing something. We’re challenging ourselves. We’re pushing ourselves past our comfort zone and creating something new and creating delight for ourselves. This is a woman who’s easily delighted. I love her so much and I’m so proud of her.

She put on her stories all weekend, her climbing Whistler Mountain literally the whole weekend. And it was cold, and wet, and it was treacherous, and it was just mind work really more than anything. When her mind told her she couldn’t do it, she did it. She couldn’t take another step, she took another step. And she just kept overcoming her mind and she did it, she completed it. She’s so proud of herself.

I can’t wait to hear more about everything that she went through this last weekend, just the ups and the downs, and the highs and the lows, and the joys and the grueling-ness of the whole event. But because she’s in my life and such an inspiration for me, now of course my mind is expanding like, oh my gosh, what could I commit to in the next 90 days? What event maybe should I look at that I could train for? That for every single reason for health’s sake, for mental sake, for just pushing myself to what’s possible for me.

So, she’s been an example for me. And I want to be an example for you. So what can you commit to for the next 90 days? What can you train for, for the next 90 days so that when January 1st, 2023, comes around, which it’s going to be here in a blink of an eye, you know that, and I know that. And how fun and how easily delighted we’re going to be on January 1st when we look back at the 90 days that we committed to something and achieved something that was so amazing for us. Let’s do that together.

I want you to commit to something. I don’t care what it is, paint your house the color that you’ve always wanted to paint it. Give it all a fresh coat of white, or organize your closets, organize your kitchen, lose 10 pounds, write a book, start a blog, start a podcast. I mean literally I started a podcast in probably six weeks, in less than 90 days and look how much this has transformed not only me, but it’s helping so many of you transform your life. It doesn’t take much, it just takes some commitment and a new idea of what’s possible for you and for me.

And we can become women who are easily delighted. I know that I already and I know why I am. It’s because I live the way that I do. I live intentionally. I live on purpose. I delight in all the little things every single day, and I’m not hard on myself. I just let myself be who I am, and I just cheer myself on. And I certainly don’t let my past decide what my future is going to look like. I get to decide what my future looks, and I know that if it’s something different than I created in my past, I have to think different thoughts than I’ve ever thought before.

Our past does not create our future. Our past does create our feature if we want it to stay more of the same. But if we want it to be something different we have to change the way that we think, the way that we feel, and the way that we show up to our lives every single day. And that just means setting a goal and then practicing that goal every single day no matter what, every single day when your brain doesn’t want to. Your brain will never want to. I’m just breaking that to you now.

Your brain will want to yesterday, it’ll want to today, it’ll keep putting it off and it’ll go, “Oh, let’s not do it today, let’s do it tomorrow.” Just know that’s what your brain’s going to do, but you’re going to go, “No, we’re doing it today. We have to do everything today. We’re going to practice our goal today, every single day.” And then January 1st, 2023, we’re going to be so easily delighted with the progress we’ve made and just who we are and so proud of ourselves for showing up and not believing our brain when it said, “This is too hard.”

Because it’s never true, we are capable of so much more than we let ourselves believe we are. Take it from me, I know. Alright, well I love you so much for showing up today, become a woman who’s easily delighted by setting yourself a goal and then showing up for yourself every single day until that goal is achieved. A 90 day goal is the perfect container, the perfect amount of time. You have October, you have November, and you have December and then January 1st, you’re going to go, “Yay me, yay me for doing the thing. And what’s the next new thing?”

That’s how you stay out of retirement. That’s how you stay in the land of easily delighted which is the best land to live in. Alright, share this episode with anyone, any woman that you know would love to learn how to be easily delighted. It’s just a change in your thinking. And we can all change our thoughts any time we want to, it’s completely and always up to us. Alright, have the best week and I will see you next Thursday.

Thanks for listening to Reinvented After 40. If you want more information or resources from the podcast, please visit KymShowersLifeCoach.com.